Vile deeds and voyeurism

The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is — as ever — that of Proust. The visiting and revisiting of the past; the dwelling on the minutiae of memory; the attention to social hierarchy, the demands of lust and the force of cruelty — not to mention the labyrinthine sentences weighted with subordinate clauses… Marcel would breathe easily here.

Trying to encapsulate a novel by Marías in a few lines is as frustrating as attempting to ‘explain’ Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ in one sentence. Both are minutely detailed — but what are we seeing? What are we being told? On one level Thus Bad Begins shows us an innocent young man being drawn into a cat’s cradle of marital warfare, betrayal, truth and lies. But it’s also a middle-aged man looking back at his young self with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.

Marías, Spain’s most celebrated novelist, generally considered Nobel laureate-in-
waiting, is best known for his dazzling 1,600-page trilogy Your Face Tomorrow, exploring his favoured themes of treachery, political chicanery, metaphysics and, by no means least, sex. His previous book, The Infatuations, was a philosophical meditation masquerading as a murder mystery.

The new novel is set in post-Franco Madrid, where long-buried resentments (and bodies) can surface, the storyline drifting between the present and various pasts. The narrator, Juan de Vere, recalls the experience that profoundly changed him and his destiny, when he took a job with the once famous but now fading film director Eduardo Muriel. Elegant, with black eye-patch and fine tailoring, frequently described as brilliant, Muriel has, we gradually realise, directed some pretty schlocky stuff.

Marías himself is a film buff and the story is freighted with screen references, often to drily comic effect.